Introducing El Pais: A Spanish Media Outlet That Shows Clear Anti-Israel Bias - by Masha Gabriel

As a result of its switching to a digital-subscription model, El País has launched a campaign to increase, if possible, its prestige. As part of the campaign, an enlarged cartoon by the newspaper’s cartoonist, El Roto, was painted in the newspaper’s headquarters: a Batman-style superhero with two pens as ears, and a phrase: “Always with the readers.” With its readers — maybe. With the truth — it doesn’t seem so.

Masha Gabriel..
Algemeiner..
26 March '20..

In a recent statement, Senator Bernie Sanders claimed to be a reader of the Spanish newspaper El País. This is evidence of the global influence of the Spanish media outlet.

The newspaper was founded in Spain in the second half of the 1970s, at the beginning of the country’s transition to democracy. It represented a new way of doing journalism in a nation that was starting to awaken after 36 years of dictatorship.

Here’s how the newspaper defines itself: “Four decades later, it remains the Spanish media outlet of reference inside and outside Spain.”

However, the clumsiness with which the newspaper reports about Israel is striking: its news stories are often sprinkled with evident signs of ignorance.

Consider some examples.

To begin with, El País has a “geographical-obsessive” problem. By that I mean, it tends to see Israeli or Jewish settlements everywhere. Even a spring can easily become a settlement if the headline requires it.

Thus, Ein Bubin, a spring where a young Israeli woman was murdered, became — for the purposes of a headline: “An Israeli teenager dies in a bomb attack in a settlement in the West Bank” (August 23, 2019).

From spring to settlement, as if by magic.

That’s not the only problem.

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